Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday March 12, 2015 @10:14PM
from the break-it-down dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications. The amount of calculation achieved in a few milliseconds can sometimes be mind-blowing. This post about the breakdown of a frame rendering in Deus Ex: Human Revolutiontakes us through the different steps of the process. It explains in detail the rendering passes involved, the techniques as well as the algorithms processed by a computer — 60 times per second."

I have to agree- especially with all the low cost or free (as in beer to an extent) engines out there now, too many games seem to be going the 2D 8 bit style. Even the 2D can be ok, but at least spend a little more effort to make some HD graphics. A lot of late nineties flash games had better graphics.

So, because of a temporary trend, we should throw away one of the foundations of gaming as a recreational activity? WTF? You know what lies down that path, right? We've been there before. It sucks ass down there.

"Arborea was covered in several Amiga magazines, which predictably focused on the graphics, sound, and music rather than the actual gameplay elements. (The May 1991 review from CU Amiga begins by giving thanks that "the days [are gone] when a role-playing game meant little more than a great leap

And yet... I have had masses of fun over the last 6 months with Farcry 4, Dragon Age 3, Alien Isolation and Forza Horizon 2. Big, AAA technical-powerhouse games. And all of them more enjoyable than anything I've seen come out of the indie-sector.

It is a commonly-held myth - but a myth nonetheless - that good graphics and good gameplay are mutually exclusive.

No, but I just looked at its Steam page and it looks like yet another pseudo-8-bit sprite art game. Local multiplayer oriented... no singleplayer to speak of and, looking at the trailer, nothing particular gripping about the concept either. Not interested.

I'll stick to Farcry 4 and Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters for now, until Bloodborne comes out in a couple of weeks.

The page is particularly annoying, especially the frame autoplay which gives strictly no control to the viewer to shorten the delay between the rendering stage... Too bad a website fails to pass its message due to a piss poor implementation...

Over 500 draw calls per frame. I've only ever tinkered in basic OpenGL stuff, but does that seem like an awful lot to anyone else? I was always told to reduce draw calls and to use the newer OpenGL features as they were able to batch commands on thousands of vectors, etc. (or are we talking about different types of draw calls?)

Especially as a lot of the work is done in shaders and shared between passes according to the article?

No, 500 draw calls per frame is not *that* much. The majority of the calls are for different materials: For your toy project, that won't be a lot. For an AAA title, it's more like hundreds of material combos.

500 draw calls per frame is tiny. This is actually a rather boring scene -- it's indoors, you don't need to render anything outside the walls (save for the room through the glass window in the back), and even then the scenery is somewhat sparse. In open world games or any game with a detailed horizon, this blows up to many thousands of draw calls per pass (so 10k+ for frame).

Graphics pipelines are pretty good at stomping through draw calls as long as you don't make expensive state changes (e.g. changing ble

So you can't tell the difference between movie and home video? Source for you, in a any case: http://www.100fps.com/how_many... [100fps.com]
Whatever floats your boat: I can personally see difference of 60fps to less, and I quite like 60fps.

What's annoying is that none of these sites seem to give a straight answer to how many frames per second we can actually distinguish. Yes, even an extremely short flicker of light is detectable but can we notice the difference between a 60 fps and 250 fps video? Here's my proposal:

1. Get some *extremely high* fps footage, for example the Phantom Flex4K can do 1000 fps for 5 seconds.2. Make interpolations that play at normal speed, like:7 -> 1 frame for 142.8 fps8 -> 1 frame for 125 fps10 -> 1 frame

Can I tell the difference between 60 and 250? Absolutely. Heck, I can tell the difference between 60 and 75 fps, and can identify a frame rate below 100 pretty readily if things onscreen are moving quickly. (...) When I was gaming regularly, I couldn't stand playing at less than 100 fps.

Games don't have natural motion blur, if I throw a ball in front of the camera it'll travel during the 1/24th second and leave a smear while a game rendered at 24 fps will have the ball jump in discrete steps like filmed with a strobe light. The easiest way to fix that is to render more frames so the steps become smaller and a better approximation to reality's infinitely smooth motion. What you're measuring isn't how important the frame rate is for the display, but how important the sampling speed is for th

Context matters a lot here. When I see a good frame in a game, I am not moving so everything looks great. But that's for the sort of games I have. 30fps is definitely good enough for lots of things, in an MMO 15fps is probably good. However I guess for testosterone fueled shooter games that higher FPS makes a difference just because the view point is changing so rapidly.

Basically I can't see the problem with 15-20fps unless I take the mouse and jiggle it back and forth rapidly, which is something never

This is a joke right? Simulating fluid dynamics, simulating weather patterns, finding large primes, factoring primes, etc. are all far more computationally intensive. And that isn't even close to an exhaustive list. Rendering a video game is kiddy stuff in comparison.

This is a joke right? Simulating fluid dynamics, simulating weather patterns, finding large primes, factoring primes, etc. are all far more computationally intensive.

Errr... factoring primes is one of the least computationally intensive problems possible. The factors are always 1 and the number itself. I think you meant finding prime factors.

In any case you are being a bit pedantic. It is clear that the author was referring to computationally intensive retail software running on commonly available retail hardware. There is no mass-market for weather forecasting software or fluid dynamics simulators.

A lot of the real-world tough stuff can apply to video games (but often doesn't because as you say, it's computationally hard to do realtime). However, some stuff like physics modelling did start to take off when it finally got adopted in games. Similarly, a lot of fluid dynamics/simulations are being looked at to improve game realism (which is useful for stuff from water flow to realistic body movement such as fat, breasts, or buttocks).

I love reading this stuff. I remember, back in the days of Amigas and Atari STs where I cut my 3D-programming teeth, it was a struggle simply to render each pixel of the frame buffer once, even at a juddery 10fps. Shadow maps! Bloom effects! Even the supercomputers couldn't do this stuff in my day, or would take hours of rendering time. A little bit sad that I left this world just as computer power started to make it interesting. Mind you, I think the most impressive 3D game of all time, in terms of getting

Pretty amazing, Really. But why does it still look worse then a modded eldersign? Now that is so impressing shit. Also, who stole all the colors? The death of PC gaming was herald by brown and tan in every game.